January29, 2009

Washington, DC – House Armed Services Committee
Chairman Ike Skelton (D-MO) released a statement on the
Department of Defense’s Quadrennial Roles and
Missions Review Report, which was required by the Fiscal
Year 2008 National Defense Authorization Act:

“The Quadrennial Roles and Missions Review Report
demonstrates that the Department of Defense’s
understanding of its mission and the core competencies
required to achieve it has expanded quite substantially since
the attacks of 9/11. The scope of the mission the
Department is preparing to tackle is daunting and will
require careful scrutiny.

“This report represents an advance by organizing in
one place a host of ideas about new or newly emphasized
missions for the Department – from the need to provide
support to civil authorities, to cyber warfare, to training
and mentoring foreign security forces. It raises
significant issues about the appropriate role of the
Department in these areas that will be heavily debated in the
national security community in the coming years.

“At the same time, this report shows the Department
still has a lot of work ahead to reform its organization,
budgets, and processes to execute this mission. The
report makes only a small contribution to the difficult task
of challenging the allocation of treasured turf and changing
deeply held cultures within the Department which will be
required to actually fulfill such a far reaching mission
set.

“I am reminded that the last time this task was
seriously tackled, in the immediate aftermath of World War
II, it took several years and the personal intervention of
President Harry Truman to reach a workable consensus. I
very much appreciate the work of Admiral Mullen and Secretary
Gates in kicking off a similar cycle of reevaluation of these
issues in this report. As Congress anticipated when it
established this review as a continuing requirement every
four years, there remains much work to do.”